I don't want to hear it, anyway. All my life, I've labored after love, because from day one, I've been fed the line that love is labor. It was hard work getting my thick head out of my petite mother's abdomen, and life's only got a little easier since. I worked for my mother's poor heart, my dad's hard-earned approval. I worked for a job. I worked for a degree, a home, a future. Then what? "Work to live, don't live to work!" Sure. So I did. Like I'd always done, I worked hard at it.

Her name was Monica. Yeah, she'll miss me. And me? I don't want to talk about it.

So when that Mazda came crashing down? When that blue-hot halogen bore down on me and you stopped time? Yeah, I was impressed. Amazed. Tearstruck. Awestruck. Awed. Touched, even.

So then you tell me, "Keep going. Have faith. A kingdom awaits the meek, humble in love."

The only words that come to me, come in poetry. Yet here I am, covered in snot and tears and a shaking sack of broken lines, and I'm supposed to find this beautiful? Is this what I'm here for?

I mean, I know all the right words, or at least a few good ones. Her hair - I could just say something about her hair, about the way it used to shine in the light. Used to. No, no. Not her hair. Her eyes, then? Gods, I can't remember the color of her eyes. Her eye-shadow used to glitter, turquoise and gold sometimes. Kohl used to smoke and streak like some other culture's stolen mysteries, like something cursed. Now? The only colors I can see are red cracks and muddy, murky stains. So no. No, not her eyes. Let's just forget about her face entirely. Okay.

Okay. I can lie, I guess. I could be empathetic. I could try to understand her situation, but fuck, I'm barely surviving my own. Who came up with this scenario? You cry, I hold you. I cry, you hold me. Is that all we are? Just.. pillars on a weak foundation, holding one another up? Is the ground that bad? Is the floor that horrible? Can I even care about somebody else so very goddamned broken? Can I?

Should I? Or is this about me? Oh, yes. Of course. It's always about me. I mean, I know all the right words, or at least a few good ones. At one time or another, I've even meant them.

She did the worst thing to him she could think of. She bound his skin to tenterhooks and twisted.

His flaws were the first thing to go. His smile was just a little too sloppy, too wide, too dangerous. His casual words came from a lolling, lazy tongue, so that she replaced with shiny aluminium. It's more proper that way. She filleted the thick meat of selfish living down to bare bones and replaced even those with wrought iron and oiled joints. She gave all of his parts purpose.

Then came his history, which just really wouldn't do. She unlearned all of his lessons. She rewrote the way they'd met. She opened up the crystal candy case of his organic brain and she ran copper lines and quicksilver down the ridges until something fit. The past is best manipulated, not remembered, after all. Backstories ought to hurt, if only just a little.

Last? She took away his dreams. She told him all that he could be. He could be nothing less.

He could be nothing more. Well, no. I suppose that, if he broke, then he could just be nothing.

She did the worst thing to him she could think of. She remade him in her own image.

Lying is the proof of our human experience. Art is the art of the perfect lie.

Tumblr makes for a perfect example. It's the definition of a safe space. We receive only the content we pursue. We can flag, ignore, delete the experiences we don't want to taste. To steal a line? Here, 'everything is beautiful and nothing hurts'...unless we want it to. The pain is good.

That's why Tumblr is an art site. Tumblr itself is art, a collage of our own making. A microcosm.

We can't bear the raw data of the lives we lead. From the most privileged to the battered and beaten-down, we all struggle with our experience. We are all in the worst pain we've ever felt. We are all subject to the worst days we'll ever know. We aren't programmed for perspective. We have very little depth perception, especially for the world off-screen. It's just too much to take.

So we filter down. We add sepia tones. We share what we know. We write what we know. We see what we know, because those are the experiences that affirm us. The pain is good. The joy is even better. Art communicates in sharp contrasts and soft edges, because we can handle that.

And why is so much art about love? Just how much of love and what comes with it can we take?

Just how much of love do we really, really look at?

Art is the art of the perfect lie, and the way that we see love is no exception.

Prompt: An aesthete of an Anonymous asked me:

How does art show the human experience? How are art and love connected?

This piece can be as uplifting or depressing as you like. How comfortable are you with escape?

Nimble fingers plucking out a random rhythm on a beat-up bass. That was everything to her.

She used to care about big, shiny parties. Sometime, she still shivered from the long-expired leftovers. She could feel the hungry people, clutching at her like finger sandwiches, soaking her skin in champagne. She remembered feeling beautiful at first. Like a tablecloth, you know, before.

White-on-black kicks, scuffed into something gray, textured, and tough tapped out a rhythm.

She used to dream about music. Now she needed songs to sleep. She used to roll down rivers, Brandon Boyd singing a lullaby while whatever new dad roamed the halls in the wrong direction. Her way. She let Lostprophets drown out all the girls who hated her hips, all the boys who loved her body, while she sunk deep into circuit boards and sound consoles. She was Tragedy Bound.

Lips popping out percussion, until clean, white teeth part and pull at the cheap, red second skin.

She lights went brought across the cityscape and she looked up. The gunshots didn't get any quieter. Police sirens and ambulances still roared like an angry crowd. The light was supposed to be about hope, but what's hope without music? What's imagination without a little desperation?

Then some creeper walked by, a zonked half-naked girl in his arms. Her mental record skipped.

He was dressed like Chippendale's. It was just the sort of thing she'd see at the wrong parties back West. The music stopped, or at least it shouldn't have. She didn't notice the riffs ramping up. She only heard the ringing in her ears, her half-imagined battle aura like some anime. She imagined being strong.

Then she slammed her Rickenbacker hard across the back of his skull. He didn't see it coming.

The girl dropped, but he went flying a good 30 feet into a Cadillac. She hadn't seen that coming.

Then the gang across the street spilled out like ants. Then the blonde girl woke up and spontaneously combusted. Then a black girl cosplaying TRON goes to PROM descended from the sky. Then a random... girl? Boy? Street kid dropped a reuben and screamed like all hell. At her.

Holy rusted metal, Batman... She was glowing. Her bass vibrated like sex. The track changed...

"You know...you remind me of my father..." There was something heartbreaking in those eyes.

I dropped the spray-paint can and backed away. People used to being followed have this presence and it was there, hard and hot. Some eyes have a predatory vibe. Others have a sort of military focus that's just too laser-lined and weathered down to be human. Cops can be both.

"Hey, now. No need to be afraid." The stranger in the hood and the coat with the blue diamond patch was neither. The power was fluid. Easy. Like a wolf that wasn't hungry. The voice was soft, but so strong. Like mothers singing low in the dark, or how hermano used to read to me. "I only want to know - why did you make this?" He pointed to the rebel art bleeding above us.

A beauty, kneeling and serene. Burning, with golden tears. Armed, but without anger in her fingers. Something in it compelled the stranger to touch it, staining fingers fire-red. "Why this?"

I looked down and away. Some people don't know how to hide from strangers. It's not fair. It's ugly and uncomfortable. This nobody was hurting something bad, that much was obvious. They didn't know or care enough to be hard.

Me? I'd been hard for so long, I could only let my secrets out in code, in illegal colors. My work.

"She's my angel," I forced myself to answer. I squared off, ready. Like I was protecting her.

The stranger's eyes flicked back down at my words - ice blue and way too bright. I took a step back, but they caught me before I could stumble and smudge my own work.

"What is it?" I demanded. The stranger shrugged. Under the hood, all I could make out were those crazy neon eyes, the slick ends of dark, kinky curls, and the cherry end of an e-cigarette.

"She..." A faint chuckled interrupted. "Was my angel, too. But she looked different. Maybe its' because I'm not Catholic. Come on. I'll buy you a sandwich, introduce you to a friend." A brief pause. "Well, an acquaintance with gold and silver to burn. Our angel ought to last, and it's a sin-" A wince. "No, just a shame, that persecuted art isn't remembered. Those colors speak truth."

The darkness bled away as the Franks tower and a once-dim, once-dead city came back to life. The bright blue eyes closed. The soft smile, lit false-fire red, seemed to glow. "My father was an artist, you see. You remind me of him. Sad, stubborn eyes... Let's make sure that art survives."

I should have backed away. I should have run. But there's something about a body left so bare, even through those heavy clothes. "Y...yeah, sure. Yeah, okay, whatever. Just lemme add wings."

"Wings?" There was a long, sad sigh, a smothered laugh. "Angels don't have those kind of wings."

Superman has blood on his hands. There are no Western Isles and Frodo's eyes will never cool, not even down to a simmer. We saw the hero we needed and we cheered for the villain we really deserve. Even after we let him fall.

Ours is not a naive generation. That's why we're the perfect ones to save the world.

I grew up on science fiction and fantasy. I learned right and wrong from superheroes and Martin Luther King. I was sitting in my French class when the towers fell. The dust still hasn't settled. We have grown up, not through a Depression, but through a more insidious and unresisted poverty. I have magic in my grasp. I have all the information I could ever want, one little search box away. Still, I can't stand to look at it more than a few minutes a day. I'm unusual. Most just filter out hard truths.

Dates vary, but this is my millennial generation. This is the backstage to our stories.

We still have our heroes, from Harry Potter to Katniss Everdeen, to Sam and Dean to Sherlock. That said, they aren't the heroes of our parents and our grandparents. We have more in common with T.S. Eliot and Percy Shelley than we ever will with Siegel and Shuster. We don't believe in Superman, because most of us were never lucky enough to see him in our own lives. We were born jaded. Born in doubt.

I believe that our speculative fiction - our science fiction, fantasy, mystery, any story built outside of everyday experience - is already changing. It belongs to us, handed down from our neglectful parents. Just like everything else we got, it's a goddamned mess. So now what? Our elders don't know how to use their iPhone. But we do.

Millennial fiction is disillusioned. We know we aren't in Kansas and never were. We adapt fast. We know that there's just a dirty old man behind that curtain and we're kind of pissed off about that. The protagonists of our generation are and will be snarky, flawed, and emotionally overburdened - just like us. We know that Obi-Wan is full of it. We know that Dumbledore's got skeletons and more inside his closet. The heroes of our stories aren't going to listen long to lies; we've heard them all.

Millennial fiction is diverse, and in more ways than one. We don't want straight, white (or maybe alien) heroes. We want queer aliens of color trying to hold down a part-time gig at Macy's. We want love stories that transcend categories, dropped into all the wrong settings. We want naughty sex and we want sweet love. We want our fears and feelings affirmed. We want, for the first time in many of our troubled lives, for our heroes to look like us. Most of all? We want to take our stories out of the hands of the fools who came before us. Gods, look at what they did to them...

Last and most important - the big take-away from all of this - is that millennial fiction is determined. We don't have the time or patience for more Bella Swans or Princess Peaches. We get it. Our stories will get it. Privilege will be made obvious. Ignorance will rear its ugly head as a central, if not the only true antagonist in our stories. We will humanize our villains, but we will beat them. We will act with open eyes and compassion, but we will do ugly things. We will make the hard choices.

Millennial fiction, no matter the genre, the magic, the future mechanics, will all be stories about hope, hurt, and the consequences. That's who we are. That's what we see. That's why we'll win. And believe me, we will. We will win. We will overcome.

Wonder Woman will be powerful, sexual, intelligent and will set her own terms on what strength really means. The Age of Men in the Middle Earth will be short, replaced by an Age of Open Hands after endless wars. The Joker will keep being cool.

Ours is not a naive generation. That's why we're the perfect ones to save the world. And we will.

Imagine if you could feel it, from your bones to your balls, from your soles to your ovaries or lack thereof. Imagine sharing all the feelings of all the others that you pass by, city streets or country roads. Mingling on elevators, rolling dusty tumble weeds, rising, falling, writhing to a human tide. Would you lose your mind or find it, do you think?

I do. At least, I think I feel it, sometimes. I feel a little baby's finger grasping mine across a boulevard. I fear the white woman passing by, what she might say or do from fear of me. We're both ashamed and careful. I see but do not see the hungry body sleeping next to me. I'd cry, if I didn't find it condescending. Is it?

Maybe. Even if I tasted every tongue and open wound around me, would I know? Can a single moment tell me more that, a moment? Can I judge them from their songs, t-shirts, or stupid comments? Would it change a thing if I could show them? If I could reblog them my perspective?

Maybe. I mean, isn't every artist crazy? Writers sketch out with misshapen characters, the characters that we observe. We even try, in our own way, to give them all what they deserve. We try to make some sense out of the slopes and curves of kindness, tragedy, and conflict. Does it work?

I doubt it. It never works in person, does it? Do you ever really know a whole story? Even if you slip into every character, lick up all their pages? Wouldn't we imagine different faces, every reader, writer, blogger and bystander? I don't think three eyes see the same colors. Still, I try it every day.

Still, I hope and dream to find a way to speak my mind and share it out, engage your spaces.

And, yes, one day? Get paid to make this. Is that all right?

Sure. We all pay for what sustains us.

Prompt: A passionate Anonymous asked me:

One love.

Still seeking pieces to reblog and review. If you see me, why not try me? Just e-mail me.

(c) 2013 Lawerence Hawkins. I could also use like, reblogs, prompts, questions, or commentary.